Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Somehow, having an Enemies List is all right if you’re Barack Obama and not Richard Nixon.

By Victor Davis Hanson — February 16, 2016

It has become an iffy idea to cross Barack Obama. After seven years, the president has created a Hugo Chávez–like deterrent landscape, intended to remind friends and enemies alike that he is perfectly willing to use the federal government’s vast power to go after those he finds politically inconvenient, while exempting those he understands to be sympathetic to his agendas.

In Freudian fashion, Obama has long joked about using the power of government in a personal way. As early as 2009, when he had been invited to give the Arizona State University commencement address but had not been granted an honorary degree, he warned of rogue IRS audits: “I learned never again to pick another team over the Sun Devils in my NCAA brackets. . . . President [Michael] Crowe and the Board of Regents will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS.” Jesting about politically driven IRS audits is always scary — scarier when life imitates art in the age of Lois Lerner.
Remember when Obama, on the Spanish-language Univision network shortly before the 2010 midterm elections, urged Latino groups to join him, in ancient tribal us/them fashion, in going after “enemy” Republicans. Instead of sitting out the election, he told them in community-organizing fashion, they should say: “We’re gonna punish our enemies, and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.”RELATED: America’s Most Dangerous Demagogue Lives in the White House
That threat recalled his 2008 campaign braggadocio about urging his supporters to bring (of all things!) “a gun” (“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun. Because from what I understand folks in Philly like a good brawl”), and “to get in their face” (“I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors. I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face”).
Obama had apparently envisioned the campaign against John McCain as some sort of brawl in the waning days of the Roman Republic. Obama also jested about drones incinerating their targets when he warned the pop-rock group the Jonas Brothers to steer clear of his two daughters: “Sasha and Malia are huge fans, but boys, don’t get any ideas. Two words for you: Predator drones. You will never see it [sic] coming.” Joking about pushing a button to incinerate a suspected terrorist and anyone in his general vicinity — let alone a group of pop singers — is a most unliberal thing to do.RELATED: How Barack Obama Has Fundamentally Transformed American Politics
Obama also personalized, in Chávez fashion, his war on a subset of the 1 percent (mostly the upper-middle-class entrepreneur rather than the trust-fund grandee). Obama certainly has a visceral dislike not of the wealthy per se (whose lifestyles he seems to idolize and uses government perks to emulate), but of the “selfish” rich whom he deems obstructive of his own worldview. He feels that an Economic Commander-in-Chief should adjudicate who deserves what: “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” Or: “I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.” Or: “There will be time for them to make profits, and there will be time for them to get bonuses — now is not that time. And that’s a message that I intend to send directly to them.”
To have a legitimate disagreement with the president is to be caricatured as either a coward or a bully. On illegal immigration, Obama complained that Republicans were “scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States.” Earlier, he had claimed they wanted to round up kids having ice cream: “But now, suddenly, if you don’t have your papers and you took your kid out to get ice cream, you’re going to be harassed.”
But aside from the psychodramatic tics and the jokes in poor taste, Obama has used government in a fashion contrary to the Constitution. IRS official Lois Lerner directed the federal tax agency to dole out tax-exempt status to groups on the basis of their ideology, and — particularly during a campaign season — on whether they were perceived Obama supporters. After staging a phony question-and-answer mea culpa, she pled the Fifth Amendment before a congressional committee of inquiry and retired with her full pension and apparent exemption from criminal prosecution.RELATED: President Obama’s Top Ten Constitutional Violations of 2015
President Obama by executive order has nullified U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s effort to enforce federal immigration laws, apparently on the basis of perceived political advantage — and in a manner contrary to his own earlier campaign warnings about the illegality of just such executive-order overreach: “With respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that’s just not the case, because there are laws on the books that Congress has passed. . . . We’ve got three branches of government. Congress passes the law. The executive branch’s job is to enforce and implement those laws. And then the judiciary has to interpret the laws. There are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system that for me to simply through executive order ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as president.”
In similar fashion, the Environmental Protection Agency, under the leadership of Lisa Jackson (who left her directorship abruptly and in controversy over assuming a fraudulent e-mail persona in her official communications, and who is currently on the Clinton Foundation Board), exceeded federal law in targeting particular energy companies for their deemed opposition to the president’s political agendas.
We’ve apparently long forgotten how the administration and its ideological operatives, especially when in campaign mode, singled out Boeing in South Carolina, went after Gibson Guitar, seemed eager to talk about and mischaracterize the Romney tax returns, posted invective on Romney’s campaign donors, and habitually harangued the NRA almost immediately after each tragic mass shooting (“This is something we should politicize,” Obama remarked of the Umpqua Community College shooting in Oregon). The Obama administration has been a veritable continuation of Obama’s 2004 Senate race, when the sealed divorce records of his two chief rivals — first in the primary election and then in the general election — mysteriously were released, imploding both campaigns.
The common thread in the scandals or incompetence at the EPA, GSA, ICE, IRS, Justice Department, NASA, Secret Service, and VA has been Obama’s desire to advance his own particular political agendas in a fashion contrary to the supposed disinterested nature of these bureaucracies, if necessary putting in place political incompetents who would unquestioningly do his bidding. NASA, for example, has no business making its “foremost” aim outreach to Muslims. In the Obama era, most Americans now just assume that Black Panthers can intimidate voters at a polling place; and that illegal aliens with criminal records do not face deportation in sanctuary cities; and that failed green companies can extort federal dollars, while successful coal companies and utilities are hounded; and that Cabinet secretaries facing accusations of scandal, incompetence, or unethical behavior — Lisa Jackson, Eric Shinseki at the VA, Kathleen Sebelius at HHS, Hilda Solis at the Department of Labor — just seem to quietly resign and float away in a fashion most unlike General Petraeus.
Finally, it can be a career-ending gamble for an individual to publicly oppose the president in a manner that questions his various narratives. Obama’s domestic critics can become regarded as greater threats than our traditional foreign enemies — at least if the comparative venom of the president’s invective is any indication. The sudden indictment of Senator Robert Menendez (D., N.J.) on old charges came coincidentally right after the senator opposed the president’s Iran deal, one of the few Democrats to do so.RELATED: Obama’s Legacy Is Already Collapsing
Obama critic and documentary filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza was jailed for a minor campaign-contribution infraction of the sort that typically earns a small fine. Was wrongly circumventing campaign-donation regulations a more severe crime than diverting a federal Gulfstream jet to junket on the public dime at the Belmont Stakes with one’s daughters and their boyfriends, in Eric Holder fashion? Which offense is the greater conspiracy to commit fiscal fraud?
Again, the point is always two-sided deterrence — to remind Washington insiders to ask themselves whether they really wish to end up like D’Souza and Menendez, or like Lerner and Holder.
Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, an obscure Internet video-maker, suddenly was jailed on a minor parole violation and was damned publicly — and falsely — as the catalyst for the 2012 Benghazi attacks, in which four Americans were killed. No one now believes — as President Obama, National Security Adviser Susan Rice, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for so long insisted to the world — that Nakoula’s amateurish video prompted spontaneous mobs to take to the streets of Benghazi (just by coincidence on September 11) and to torch the American consulate and zero in their ad hoc GPS-guided mortars on the consulate annex.VIDEO: Montage: Obama’s Contributions to Civility in Washington
Nakoula’s jailing salvaged not just one but two of the president’s reelection-campaign talking points: (a) that al-Qaeda, thanks to Obama’s singular efforts, still “was on the run” and impotent, and (b) that the president was still devoted to the Nobel-laureate work of opposing right-wing bigots, like the easily caricatured Nakoula, who were attempting to subvert the president’s ecumenicalism and disrupt the lives of innocent Americans by inciting religious hatred.
CIA Director General David Petraeus was forced to resign shortly after Obama’s successful reelection campaign in 2012, under mysterious circumstances, reportedly because he had improperly revealed classified information to a biographer, with whom he was having an affair. But that fact had been revealed to, but was not disclosed by, members of the Obama administration, months before the November 2012 election. The strange timing poses the question of why such misconduct was considered a non-firing offense before, but not after, the president’s reelection, when Petraeus, as CIA director, was likely to be slated to testify again, and at greater length, to a closed session of Congress on the Benghazi disaster.
The serial message goes out that it is unwise for a federal official or a prominent individual to oppose President Obama and his policies — while illegal or incompetent conduct, if undertaken in the president’s perceived interest, is considered to have been for a good cause and thus exempt from accountability.
In other words, there is no rule of law any more — an ossified relic in our pen-and-phone era of social justice.— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals.

Keep these in mind as you contemplate the direction of the American government over the past 50 years and especially since the Obama election.

The Goals of Communism

(as read into the congressional record January 10, 1963, from "The Naked Communist" by Cleon Skousen)

1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.

2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.

3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.

4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.

5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.

6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.

7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.

8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.

9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.

10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.

11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)

12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.

13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.

14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.

15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.

16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.

17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.

18. Gain control of all student newspapers.

19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.

20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.

21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.

22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."

27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."

28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."

29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.

30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."

31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.

32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.

33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.

34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.

36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.

37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.

38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.

39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.

40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.

41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.

42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.

43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.

44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.

45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.